over all the then known world, previous to the destruction of Jerusalem. But though in these days they preached it universally, they did not plant it universally; and in like manner, we can imagine now a general publication without a general conversion of the nations, and that, instead of a diffused and universal Christianity being anterior to the next coming of the Saviour, that coming may be in judgment and sore displeasure on the irreligion and apostasy of a world that had now prepared itself for the outpourings of an accumulated wrath, by its continued resistance to all the ordinary demonstrations. Instead of a diffused and universal Christianity being anterior to the next coming of the Saviour, that coming itself may be anterior to a diffused and universal Christianity-to the restoration of the Jews, and the consequent fulness of the Gentiles. We speak not of a personal coming: there was none such at the destruction of Jerusalem, though it seems at least as if the Son of Man was then said to come in the clouds, of heaven with power and great glory. But certain it is that a coming is spoken of as yet in reserve, when, instead of being met by the glad acclamations of a christianized world, He will come like a thief in the night, and with sudden destruction as with a whirlwind-when, as in the days of Noah and Lot, He will abruptly terminate the festivities and the schemes, and the busy occupations of a secure and wholly secular generation—and, so far from coming down on a regenerated species, then waiting in joyful expectancy for their king, it is asked whether, when this descent, whatever it may be, is accom

plished, " Verily shall the Son of Man find faith upon the earth ?" We say this not in full confidence, or for the purpose of dogmatizing any, but for the purpose of exciting all to an inquiry of deepest interest; and we should not advise a perusal of the more recent interpreters of prophecy till Mede, and Chandler, and Newton, and Hurd, and Horsley, and Davison, have become familiar to them. Then may they address themselves to the lucubrations of Cunninghame, and Faber, and Irving, and M'Neile, and Bickersteth. The little work of the last mentioned author is written with so much caution, and is at the same time so pervaded by the unction of personal Christianity, that it may with all safety be made the subject of an immediate perusal.

CHAPTER VIII.

On the Connexion between the Truth of a Miracle, and the Truth of the Doctrine in Support of which it is performed.

1. For man to affirm that nothing short of Omnipotence can suspend the laws of visible nature, would seem to presume a far more extended acquaintance with nature and with the universe than in fact belongs to him. For ourselves, we can perceive nothing like self-evidence in such an assertion. We cannot tell what be the orders of power and of intelligence between us and God. We do not know either the limits or the extent of

It

their agency in the affairs of this lower world. appears to us a monstrous presumption to affirm, that no arch-angel, no secondary or intermediate being whatever, can perform a miracle. We in fact transgress the line of separation between the known and the unknown, when we make either a confident affirmation, or a confident denial upon this subject. It is one of those things which are placed on the terra incognita beyond us; and it would comport more with the soundness and modesty of true science, just to acknowledge that we cannot say. What do we know about the constitution of the universe, or the concatenations of universal being; and, though warranted to believe in a supreme and all-powerful God, is it for us to define the amount of permission or of delegated power He may have vested in the creatures who are beneath Him?

2. But at this rate, how shall we be sure of a miracle being the voucher of a messenger from God? For aught we know, it may proceed from the foul machination of a powerful but wicked spirit, bent on some infernal experiment of deceit and cruelty. That very Bible, which stands pillared on its own miraculous evidence, affirms the existence of such beings, and actuated too by a mischievous policy, the object of which is to inthrall and destroy our species. Nay we read there of lying spirits; of wonders by enchantment, which, according to the literal description of them, are to all intents and purposes miracles; of possessions by spirits of superior force and intelligence, insomuch that they imparted both a preternatural knowledge, and a

preternatural strength to those whom they occupied. Now there is a perplexity here which requires much thought and argument to unravel. It certainly tends to obscure the connexion between the truth of a miracle, and the truth of the doctrine which is sanctioned by it. It is on the adjustment of this question that the English writers on miracles have expended, we think, the most of their strength; and, while in Scotland the great labour has been to dissipate the sophistries of Hume and so' to vindicate the christian miracles as sufficiently ascertained facts in the sister kingdom it has been, admitting them as facts, to vindicate them as real credentials from the God of heaven, and so as competent vouchers for that system of religion wherewith they are associated.

3. We can be at no loss to perceive what the tenets are which in this walk of theological speculation the controvertists on either side must, for the sake of consistency, make to stand or to fall together. They, on the one hand, who affirm that the bare fact of a miracle is in itself the instant and decisive token of an immediate forth-putting by the hand of God, must explain away the feats of the Egyptian magicians in the days of Moses; must explain away the demoniacal possessions of the New Testament; must explain away certain precepts and narratives of the Old, as a certain passage for example in the history of Saul, and a precept too which recognises false miracles by the hand of false prophets. Now all this has been attempted. The divinations before king Pharaoh by the wise men of his court have been resolved

into a successful legerdemain; the ejection of evil spirits by our Saviour has been resolved into the cure of certain diseases; the preternatural appearances and doings of wicked angels, however simply and literally recorded, have been resolved into dreams, or, like the history of the fall, into mere figurative description-and all for the purpose of harmonizing those various passages with their own theory, that a miracle can never happen without God being immediately in it; and that, therefore, when associated with the promulgation of a doctrine, his faithfulness is staked to the truth of it, when associated with the utterance of a threat or a promise, his power is staked to the fulfilment of it.

4. All this would tend no doubt to simplify the evidences of Christianity, and to supersede a question in the adjustment of which there might be some difficulty. It would follow that the bare fact of a miracle must at once accredit a revelation; and that for the purpose of confirming the evidence, all further inquiry is foreclosed, because altogether unnecessary. Yet one cannot help the question, what ought to be the effect, if in such a revelation, there did occur what one knew to be a historical, or what he irresistibly believed to be a mathematical falsity ?—or what, if possible, would be more startling still, if it proclaimed a code of morality the reverse of all which conscience now holds to be sacred, of all which man is at present led by his most urgent sense of obligation to revere? Were this a mere hypothetical question, we might spare ourselves the pains of laying a difficulty conjured up by our own imagination. But Scrip